Nokia Finally Announces the Winners of their Third Annual Bell Labs Prize Competition

This year’s Prize competition attracted more than 250 proposals from 41 countries, which described innovations in Future X network, system, platform or device technologies that have the potential to be an order of magnitude (10x) better than the state of the art today.

Proposals were narrowed down to seven teams of finalists of all who demonstrated game-changing ideas in the fields of science, technology, engineering or mathematics to a group of industry luminaries in the final judging event on December 14.

From over 250 innovative ideas, only three winners were to be awarded, and in addition to the cash prizes they received, they were given the opportunity to collaborate with world-renowned Nokia Bell Labs researchers to further develop their ideas.

“The winners embody the essence of Bell Labs and the Bell Labs Prize – solving the great challenges facing humankind in the coming 10 years, with disruptive solutions that think differently,” Marcus Weldon; President of Nokia Bell Labs, said in a press statement,

The top three prize winners:

First place prize ($100,000) was awarded to the team of Sungwon Chung, Research Associate; Hossein Hashemi, Professor; and Hooman Abediasl, PhD candidate; all with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, for their Large-Scale Plasmonic Optical Phased Array – an architectural innovation for nanodevices.

Second place prize ($50,000) was awarded to Elad Hazan, Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, for Linear Learning for Deep Insight.

Third place prize ($25,000) was awarded to the team of Apostolos Georgiadis, Associate Professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland; Emmanouil Tentzeris, Ken Byers Professor at the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Georgia Tech; and George Goussetis, Professor at Heriot-Watt University, for their 3D/Inkjet Printed Millimeter Wave Systems.

Pictured below are the teams (1st, 2nd, and 3rd place from left to right) receiving their awards from Marcus Weldon. Image Credit: Nokia Bell Labs.